Only 500 tickets to go on sale

LAS VEGAS (AP) – Tickets to the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao fight will finally go on sale Thursday to the public, little more than a week before the bout.

Don’t expect to snag one at a starting retail price of $1,500, though. There will only be some 500 tickets sold to the general public for boxing’s richest fight ever, beginning at 3 p.m. EDT.

The ticket sale – announced Wednesday night – comes after the rival camps settled final details on the fight contract and how tickets would be allotted.

A conference call earlier in the day between the rival camps – with CBS head honcho Les Moonves serving as a mediator –resolved the dispute over millions of dollars in tickets, said Pacquiao promoter Bob Arum. The battle held up the sale of the 500 tickets to the general public and the release of thousands of others to ticket brokers and others.

Most of the tickets to the 16,500-seat MGM Grand Garden Arena are controlled by the two fight camps, with the remainder reserved by the MGM for its own customers. They had been unavailable, though, because the two sides were feuding over who got what tickets and where they were located.

At stake were millions of dollars because the tickets could be sold by the two camps to ticket brokers for far more than retail price.

“We worked it out orally this morning,’’ Arum said. “Once the actual contracts are signed with the changes everyone agreed to we can move forward.’’

Tickets have been an issue since the fight was announced because the MGM’s arena is far too small to meet the demand for seats at the megafight. It wasn’t until the two fighters met last month at a Los Angeles press conference formally announcing the fight that the price of the tickets was announced at $1,500 to $7,500.